Phological systems of 60 "essentially unintelligible" children between the ages of three and eight years and 60 normally-developing "intelligible" four-year-olds were analyzed and compared. All of the unintelligible children evidenced liquid deviations, cluster reduction, stridency deletion, stopping, and assimilation. Liquid deviations were demonstrated by some of the intelligible children, however, the majority produced liquids approximately, and few demonstrated any examples of cluster reduction, stridency deletion, or stopping. Most of the unintelligible children used one or more of the following processes: final consonant deletion; fronting of velars; backing; syllable reduction; prevocalic voicing; glottal replacement. The intelligible four-year-olds rarely utilized any of these latter processes, but postvocalic devoicing, substitutions of /f v s z/ for /θ/ or /ð/, and vowelization of postvocalic or syllabic /l/ were common in their speech samples.
Intelligibility/severity measurements were obtained for 48 prekindergarten children with varying levels of phonological proficiency/ deficiency. The measure used as the “standard” was percentage of words understood (i.e., orthographically transcribed correctly) in continuous speech in a known context by unfamiliar trained listeners. The children were divided into four groups based on the percentage of words understood from their continuous speech samples. The ranges of intelligibility for each group were: (a) 91–100% for children with “adult-like” speech; (b) 83–90% for children in the “mild” category; (c) 68–81% for children with moderate intelligibility/speech involvement; and (d) 16–63% for the 12 children in the “severe” (i.e., least intelligible) category. When the percentages of the children in the severe group were excluded, the range of the top three groups combined was 68–100% and the mean was 85%. For a child 4 years of age or older, any percentage of words understood in connected speech that falls below 66% (2 standard deviations below the mean) may be a potential indicator of speech difficulty. In addition, data were obtained from the 48 children to determine the correlations between the standard measure and the following intelligibility/severity measures: (a) imitated sentences, (b) imitated words, (c) listener ratings of intelligibility, and (d) phonological deviation averages. All five measures, including the standard measure, investigated in this study were strongly intercorrelated. Multiple regression analysis results yielded a prediction model that included listener ratings and imitated sentences measures. Results of multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), univariate analysis, and post-hoc Bonferroni tests indicated that differences between all pairs of groups were significant for the listener rating measure based on the continuous speech sample. For the percentage of words understood in continuous speech samples, the differences between all pairs of groups, except between the adult-like and mild groups, were also significant. The only group that differed significantly from the other three groups for all five measures was the severe group.
Utterances of 60 normally developing children, who were within 6 months of their second birthdays, were analyzed for occurrences of phonological processes. The subjects were divided equally into three chronological age groups: (a) 1:6-1:9, (b) 1:10-2:1, and (c) 2:2-2:5. The most prevalent phonological processes evidenced by all three groups were cluster reduction and deviations involving liquids (e.g., gliding). Phonological process percentage-of-occurrence means were considerably lower for the middle group than for the youngest group, with the most dramatic differences occurring for syllable reduction and postvocalic singleton omission. Potential clinical applications of the data for ascertaining what constitutes disordered phonological development in preschool children are discussed, as well as implications for specifying remediation priorities.
Performances on tasks of phonemic manipulation, working memory, rapid naming, multisyllable word naming, receptive vocabulary and nonverbal intelligence were compared with decoding and spelling scores for 75 begin-ning readers. Multiple regression analysis revealed that phonemic manipula-tion accounted for the greatest amount of variance for both decoding and spelling. Working memory and receptive vocabulary added additional unique variance for decoding. Multisyllable word naming and rapid naming contri-buted significantly to spelling. The major implication of the results is that phonemic manipulation should be included in an assessment battery for beginning readers.
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